Installing Landscape Lighting for the Kuppersmith Project House

The exterior lighting for the Kuppersmith Project house included architectural lighting to illuminate the house itself, landscape lighting, and fixtures installed in the trees to provide the soft glow of simulated moonlight. Watch this video to find out more. ...More

Installing Landscape Lighting for the Kuppersmith Project House

The exterior lighting for the Kuppersmith Project house included architectural lighting to illuminate the house itself, landscape lighting, and fixtures installed in the trees to provide the soft glow of simulated moonlight.

Trenches were dug for the underground wiring, with the wires routed to a central control box mounted on the side of the house. Once all the lighting had been installed, a test was conducted at night so any adjustments could be made. Watch this video to find out more.

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Danny Lipford: Every time I walk onto the job, I end up having several meetings, and today is no different. Jim Burks is our landscape lighting designer.

What was your, cause of course this is the first time you’ve seen the house I guess and everything.

Jim Burks: No, I’ve been here twice. I was here maybe two months ago. Paul had me drive by. And then last night, I came by and did the final design when it’s dark.

Danny Lipford: Oh, okay that makes sense.

Jim Burks: Yeah, and it’s going to be a neat project.

Danny Lipford: He’s here to help us figure out how to make the Kuppersmith home look as good after dark as it does during the daylight hours.

Jim Burks: What we’re thinking is, is washing the front, we’re going to have some smaller fixtures on the posts here. We’re going to be picking up the front, you know the white stucco part, just grazing it. We keep the fixtures in and we actually do that at night, because we can make the architectural features on the front of there with shadows, double the size.

Danny Lipford: Oh, I see, yeah.

Jim Burks: And if we would come out and wash it hard from the front, it makes it look like its vinyl.

Danny Lipford: Oh, I’ve got you, right. You see, this is one of the parts I’ve been looking forward to because, I mean, you go by a house, no matter how much someone put into it, and you go, yeah. Or you go by a house and you go, whoa, you know without the little solar things, or the, what’s the brand . . . Malibu or little things like that.

Jim Burks: Yeah, no that’s right. Well what we like to do, is have anybody that drives by, notice the property and say wow look at that property, and not notice the lights.

Danny Lipford: They’re just getting started today and they’ve brought in a mountain of fixtures to light this place up after dark.

Hey, Nick, I’ll tell you what. You’ve got a lot of little bits and pieces to put together here, I guess you know what you’re doing.

Nick Burks: Yes, sir.

Danny Lipford: To do that, they’ll have to bury what seems like miles of cable and route it to a control box just around the corner from the front door. Nick Burks is the guy in charge of this operation, so I wanted to make sure he had everything he needed.

Now, where do you get started on this thing, you know I see the guys doing some of the trenching and so forth, that minimizes the impact on the yard, but I’m a little confused, you’ve got guys up in the tree over here.

Nick Burks: What we’re doing up in the tree is we have what we call simulated moonlighting. Instead of having a large amount of path lights, pathway lights that are high maintenance; we put a few fixtures strategically up in the trees, and it simulates a moonlit night.

Danny Lipford: Now I understand that you guys are rushing right now, you’ve been here for a few hours, so you’re rushing to get everything ready for a little test tonight, is that right?

Nick Burks: Yeah, well preliminary night set, where we turn all the lights on and take a look at it.

Danny Lipford: And then tomorrow you’ll put everything out in the ground, and then have another tweaking session I guess tomorrow night. That’s the only way you can really see if it’s going to work.